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It is the differences between the visual level of information and the textual level that I believe is having the most profound influence on the graphic novel boom. Our world has increasingly become one of images. Richard Howells, in his book Visual Culture, confirms this. He writes, “We live in a visual world. We are surrounded by increasingly sophisticated visual images” (1). Much of our information comes from the ubiquitous television, which is essentially a visual medium. Many of our memories of world events are shaped by the images we see of them on television (Howells 2). Most American’s memories of September 11, 2001 surely include the same televised images of the World Trade Center towers falling. Even newspapers have become much more visual, incorporating more and more pictures as well as graphs, maps, and charts that condense textual information into bite-sized chunks, easy to absorb and digest. But probably the biggest culprit behind our culture’s turn to visual information is the Internet. At its beginnings, the Internet was mainly text-based, but further developments in technology have allowed websites to employ more visual images (Howells 232). As the Internet has continued to evolve, it has become increasingly more integrated, allowing users to view “photography, drawing, (written ) text, music and video” sometimes all at once,

sometimes linked together, so that clicking on one link moves the user to another type of media (Howells 232). Although some Internet sites combine text and pictures in ways that seem like traditional newspapers, many use interactivity to go beyond the traditional

text-with-pictures format. People read Internet web sites differently than newspapers; they look at small chunks of information, such as “highlighted keywords, bulleted lists, frequent subheadings, and paragraphs containing exactly one idea” (Gleick 87). And we get the most amount of information in the smallest chunk when we look at pictures. For all of the images we encounter in our daily lives, is it any wonder that we have come to depend on visual media? Hochheimer asks, “What does literacy, in fact, mean in the Age of Information? Is merely understanding the printed word sufficient to be considered fully literate anymore?” In a world as dominated by television and other visual media as our own, we no longer just read text, we have to read pictures, as well. Strader says that “visual literacy involves the ability to sort out visual stimuli and make sense of them, often aided and abetted by the other senses. In the strictest sense it is not purely visual but multi-sensual…” (45).

Of course, our dependence on the “reading” of images is not new. Helen Strader writes, “visual literacy was the first form of literacy, and it is a vital part of the ability to read. Recognition of shapes, sizes and colors is acknowledged to be indispensable in the development of reading ability; this is based on visual literacy” (46). Ancient humans, says Carolyn Hedley, “actively [created] a vision of the world.” They and young children are much more dependent on visual images working together with verbal language (112- 3). It’s similar to the way children learn the names of the parts of a human face. Someone points to a nose and says, “nose.” Eventually, the child grasps that the word said matches the image given to him. This visual process is very important to our process of learning language. Hedley explains that “infant and early childhood learning is concerned almost exclusively with visual thinking” (116). In fact, before modern times, but not too long

before the last century and a half, humans didn’t need textual literacy; communication among the common people was accomplished with pictures and symbols and “the oral tradition of the storyteller and actor…” (Strader 45-6). Even the precursors of the comics were designed for an audience dependent on visual literacy. The “broadsheets” produced in England in the seventeenth century did have text for those who could read, but the illustrations were the main way of transmitting the information to “an

audience…assumed to be illiterate” (Sabin 11). In modern times, though, people need to read because so much information has been transmitted through the written word. It takes an informed population to make democracy work (Strader 45-6).

These days, not only is visual information all around, it is increasing. Charles Molesworth writes, “companies, news services and so-called media conglomerates... produce and circulate almost unimaginably copious numbers of pictures for an ever- increasing array of outlets.” The increase in information is not easy to deal with. “Verbal thinking is restricted in both the amount and kind of information it can handle in a reasonable amount of time, more time than it takes a computer to produce the

information,” wrote Hedley. The overload of information, says Molesworth, “is always threatening to outstrip” even our own perception of the “real world” around us. He

continues, “our eyes are being made to feed our minds beyond satiety…we cannot simply turn off this flood of images.”

Since this visual information is all around us, and we can’t just turn it off, we have to adapt. Molesworth concludes, “…we live in a world of excess images…The media…as well as the advertising and merchandising industries have produced a flood of images that have changed the way many people see, and perhaps the way they can see.”

And because all of these visual images are not just filler, but ways of transmitting information or ideas, the “way they can see” could certainly be applied to “the way they can read.” Michele Gorman notes that the young people of today, who are growing up surrounded by technology, digital information, and visual images have become

“comfortable with non-text visual media,” a level of comfort that has led these teens to be “more at ease ‘reading’ the combination of words and pictures” (20). The trend will most likely continue with adults. Hedley suggests that with all of the new media and

technology around us, “electronics is changing our thinking”; as information is presented more and more visually, combining text and images, “we will become more visual as we combine technologies” (120). One effect of the prevalence of visual media is that media consumers have become accustomed to the immediacy of visual images. Text provides the highest level of abstraction of an event or piece of information, removing much of its immediacy for the reader (McCloud, Understanding Comics 46-7). As we become accustomed to the immediacy of visual media, the emotional impact of text may not be enough. Goldsmith writes, “Graphics-driven literature…[is] more visceral than the unadorned printed word: a pictorial representation of violence or sexual behavior is more immediate than a verbal description” (1510). One concern I have in providing graphic novels in a public library is making sure we guard ourselves against challenges. Although the content of a graphic novel may be similar to a typical adult or young adult novel, the visual images of sexual, violent, or controversial content make the graphic novel more explicit, simply because readers, especially young ones, don’t have to decode and process text explanations. Seeing an event told in pictures gets a stronger reaction from the

As our way of seeing changes, so should our definition of literacy. John Hochheimer questions the idea that it is only writing that people need to understand in order to be literate. The integration of “visual and graphic media” into people’s lives and work, says Hedley, will only increase; people will use verbal and visual presentations together, prompting our understanding of literacy to be “defined by knowledge of its graphic, pictorial form as well as its verbal one” (123). But visual literacy is not necessarily easier than textual literacy. A person’s ability to make sense of a picture or painting is dependent on coherently organizing the individual symbols and simple images cognitively so that the picture as a whole is understandable. These symbols and images, pieces of visual language, are important to understanding any kind of visual media. Strader writes, “Symbols abound in art. If the symbol is not understood, the painting will not be fully understood” (50). This “perception and ordering of images is central to reading ability…and…the core of what we mean by visual literacy” (49-50).

Comics, too, have to be read, and not just textually. Goldsmith writes, “Graphic novels require active, critical participation by the reader, who must not only be able to decode text but also follow its flow and grasp essentials of narrative, mood, character, or plot through images” (1510). The image panels themselves must be decoded, especially in Japanese comics, where several different panels might show the same moment in time (McCloud, Understanding Comics 79). Gaouette explains the complexity of decoding such representations, saying, “This cinematic approach forces readers to pull together the moment from the varied perspectives the artist has given them.” Comics also have a peculiar language, as Scott McCloud explains at length in Understanding Comics, with symbols and syntax of their own. Simple lines can be used to indicate motion, feelings,

even other senses such as touch and smell, and altered lines on the balloons encapsulating dialogue can indicate tone of voice (127-35). These conventions may even partially explain, to some extent, why comics were historically more easily accepted by younger people. Marshal McLuhan, in his landmark book Understanding Media, notes that comic books didn’t have anything that “connected” with older readers and were “as difficult to decipher as the Book of Kells,” therefore adults, for the most part, ignored the medium in its early days. “So,” says McLuhan, “having noticed nothing about the form, they could discern nothing of the contents, either” (168). Accustomed to reading text, many adults in the early days of comic books were essentially unable to read them fully.

For a culture that has an understanding of literacy that includes the ability to read images, the presence of graphic novels as a legitimate form of reading makes perfect sense. Hochheimer recalls that earlier shifts in reading created markets for new kinds of reading material. “Nearly universal literacy produced a market for mass-produced

fiction…The burgeoning number of readers also produced a market for mass journalism” (Hochhemier). And so the advent of visual readers may certainly have opened the market to graphics literature.